Artists, writer, animator, and visionary: Osamu Tezuka has been called the "god of manga" and the "Walt Disney of Japan", but he was far more than that. Tezuka was a combination of Disney, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Tim Burton and Carl Sagan, all rolled into one incredibly prolific creator. Best known for Astro Voy, the Phoenix, Kimba the White Lion, Black Jack, and countless other characters, Tezuka produced 170,000 pages of comic art in 700 different manga titles, and worked on more than seventy animated movies, TV shows, and experimental films. In the process he laid the foundation for today's manga and anime industries, influenced artists worldwide, and estabilished a system of making comics and animation that is still emulated to this day.
